Week in tech: easter eggs, pirates aren’t cool, and thinking robots

Ars recaps the top stories from the worlds of open source, tech policy, …

People love easter eggs. There are a number of humorous yet undocumented features hiding beneath the surface of some of the most popular open source software applications. We ran down five of our favorites.

For years, we've heard complaints about using the term "piracy" to describe the online copyright infringement—but most have come from Big Content's critics. Some of those concerned about online copyright infringement now realize that they may have created a monster by using the term "piracy."

A future full of helpful robots, quietly going about their business and assisting humans in thousands of small ways, is one of technology's most long-deferred promises. The biggest challenge for robots we face lies in getting them to make sense of the world. Ars looks at how robots solve this and other problems.

Court documents in the $1 billion lawsuit between Viacom and YouTube were unsealed this week, finally shedding some light on key questions: did Viacom have "smoking gun" evidence on YouTube and did Viacom upload some of the infringing videos itself?

Supercolliders are cool, and Ars got to spend some time touring the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Lab. If you missed it before, there are four pages worth of pictures for your viewing pleasure.

Canonical has recruited Matt Asay, the former vice president of business development at open source content management software company Alfresco to fill a vacancy in the COO position. He's been a skeptic of Linux on the desktop in the past, but appears to have undergone a change of heart.

From dust we came and to dust we shall all return, but our zeros and ones will live on. What happens to our posts, status updates, tweets and other online musings when our time on this mortal coil is over? Ars takes a look.

ACTA remains controversial, especially in the EU where the European Parliament trashed it by a 633-13 margin. Despite the continued opposition, President Obama remains a fan of it while European Commisioner for Trade Karel de Gucht says he wants the process opened up.

General relativity, our current best understanding of gravity, has passed yet another test—this time on a much larger length scale. A paper that is published in the current edition of Naturereports on research that incorporates gravitational lensing, galaxy clustering measurements, and growth rates of large scale structures to measure a single parameter that can be compared to the predictions of general relativity.